Italian ‘Priests’ in Calendar Are Models

posted Tue Mar. 2 18:59 pm by Nicole Martinelli

Surprise, surprise: an Italian calendar purporting to feature handsome young priests as pin-ups that made the rounds of the international press is a hoax.

The gorgeous men brooding in old-fashioned clerical outfits in “Calendario Romano 2004″ are, well, just actors and models. It took a disgruntled January, that’s actor Yuri Antonosante, to expose the truth behind a story that sparked debate over the role of priests in modern times.

“I was dressed in priest’s clothes without being told what the shoot was for,” 23-year-old Antonosante told Italian media. “It certainly hasn’t done me any good. Every time I go on a casting call they ask, ‘Father, what are you doing here?’

It was a timely gimmick in the competitive Italian calendar market, where just featuring surgically-enhanced starlets in provocative poses is no longer enough.
Photographer Piero Pazzi upped the ante with his sexy men of the cloth after another rival photographer got the bright idea of featuring nearly-naked women with stigmas in a mother of a calendar called “Madonnas.”

The closest these priestly poseurs get to the holy cloth is with one former altar boy turned model, the rest of the hunks in the Calendario were models or students dressed up in rented holy gear.

Perhaps not content with sales of the calendar, which retails for eight euro in newsstands, Pazzi has decided to come clean and produce next year’s calendar with the real deal. The official website makes an “appeal to clergymen, priests and members of religious orders” who would like to model in the 2005 version. Amen.

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